Adam Moss has not appeared in our pages until now. Given that we lean on publications that he was the editor of, especially The New York Times Magazine, it is one reason to pay attention to this review of his new book. At The New York Times he oversaw the Magazine, the Book Review, and the Culture, and Style sections, and before that edited Esquire, all of which led to his being elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019.

Photograph by Inge Morath / Magnum

The review of his book is paired with that of another, both of which enlighten on the topic of sustaining creativity over a long period. Our thanks to Alexandra Schwartz at The New Yorker for this:

Are You an Artist?

The creative life is shrouded in mystery. Two new books try to discover what it takes.

Louise Bourgeois loved to work, and she loved to talk. She especially loved to talk about her work. In the 2008 documentary “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine,” directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach—you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, isn’t that great?—she answers questions as she chisels and draws and violently wrings scraps of material as a butcher might wring a chicken’s neck. “It is really the anger that makes me work,” she says. She has just been discussing her governess, the despised Sadie, an Englishwoman who carried on an affair with Bourgeois’s father for ten years while she lived in the family home.

“All my work of the last fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood,” Bourgeois adds. Continue reading →